


Six Days At Mr Fell's

by semperfiona_podfic (semperfiona), Thimblerig



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Aziraphale is "just enough of a bastard to be worth knowing" (Good Omens), Depression, Depression napping, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fic and Podfic, Gen, Non-Cis Character, POV Outsider, Podfic, Podfic Length: 10-20 Minutes, Queer Guardian Angel Aziraphale (Good Omens), Queer Themes, Vignette, trans themes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-27
Updated: 2020-08-27
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:28:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25422424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/semperfiona/pseuds/semperfiona_podfic, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thimblerig/pseuds/Thimblerig
Summary: So Mr Fell’s is right next to Intimate Books, which I wasn’t ever allowed to go into, and it’s built like a crossroads inside. The stacks would make anyone feel small, and there are step-stools to get to the top, and chairs covered in shabby velvet that you can sit and read in for as long as you like, and a chaise longue at the end of the North branch. It has a tartan blanket. It feels like you can disappear in there for days...
Comments: 44
Kudos: 110
Collections: Pod_Together 2020





	Six Days At Mr Fell's

  


### Details

  * **Length:** 0:11:29
  * **File Size:** 11 MB



### Streaming & Hosting

  * MP3 on Google Drive [here](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xZ6jsiIOGtfvTVNf3GylxPIS4DkpxS9O/view?usp=sharing)
  * M4B on Google Drive [here](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1engFVi91S_dTkYg4NX_fcwLlmBhVG7ov/view?usp=sharing)



### Credits

  * **Author:** Thimblerig
  * **Reader:** semperfiona
  * **Effects:**
    * **Cassette button click:** aviziv at freesound.org **Cassette rewind sound:** acclivity at freesound.org
  * **Font:** shorelines script by THe Branded Quotes, at dafont.com



Back in the caveman days business was fair.

That’s just a joke - I don’t know how old Mr Fell’s shop is, but they didn’t sell books back then. All oral history and chanting, innit? Anyway, it’s been there as long as I can remember. My Mum used to tell me about pottering around the stacks when she was a tiny, and all the smell of dust and old paper, and never being able to find the same book twice. The proprietor had hair like an albino duckling, she used to say. He’d give her humbugs out of a tin.

And she’d take me there, too, when we were down Soho way. Mr Fell always looked the same, fluffy hair and all. (We’d never buy anything and I feel like a bad customer for that, but he’d always smile, and give me a humbug out of a tin.) That was when I was still small, before all the - well.

So Mr Fell’s is right next to Intimate Books, which I wasn’t ever allowed to go into, and it’s built like a crossroads inside. The stacks would make anyone feel small, and there are step-stools to get to the top, and chairs covered in shabby velvet that you can sit and read in for as long as you like, and a _chaise longue_ at the end of the North branch. It has a tartan blanket. 

It feels like you can disappear in there for days. I’d been coming there more often around the time I was fifteen. I… you know how it gets sometimes? Stuck. You get stuck. It’s not even like you’re sad, you just get stuck somewhere staring at a wall or picking at a cushion ‘til it falls apart. Or sitting in a shabby velvet overstuffed chair with a stack of dusty books you’ll never be able to find again so _of course_ you have to read them right now. Of course.

I honestly don’t think Mum minded about the girlfriend. She loved Tracy. It was the other stuff I was doing, what she called “dress-up”. Never talked about it head on, though. She’d just smile and ask me if I was doing okay in school, and were my friends nice, and I wasn’t getting hassled or anything? And I’d go into my room and find all my drawers had been gone through and the trousers put back a bit wrong, and there’d be another pretty hairclip, or a tube of lippy on the bed. Extra-flouncy skirts and whatnot. I think she was trying to be subtle. 

So there was this Wednesday just before school started back up and I was supposed to be meeting her in town, and we were going to this beauty parlour place, how jolly, and. The binder I’d saved up for had gone missing from my room last night. And I should have talked to her about that, needed to. It was just. I. I stopped off at Mr Fell’s on the way. Just half an hour with a dusty book, I think. Another half hour, there’s time. Next thing I know, I can’t read the next page of _William and the Space Animal_ because all the lights have gone out. The shop’s closed. Soho is still alive - the neon of the streets and traffic are shining blearily through the high windows. But it’d be awkward, I think, and the front door’s probably locked, so I just pull that tartan blanket over me and go to sleep.

* * *

Thursday I wake up under the blankie and there’s this big guy in a suit standing with his back to me. He’s huge, with his hair slicked back and Mysterious Bulges under his jacket. If you call Central Casting for a gangster, this is the guy you’d get. He’s standing there silhouetted by the morning light with his arms out. And he’s saying, “I do! I want to work with flowers! I want to grow lavender in the country and wear a sunhat!”

Mr Fell says, “Oh, how lovely.” (He looks thrilled.) “And will you, er, be letting your friends know of this career choice?”

“Nah,” says Central Casting Gangster. “I’m going to make a clean break, less awkward that way.”

“Well, if you think it best.”

“And I am so, so sorry for threatening to drop a lighted match in here. I was a different man then.”

“Some things are best left in the past,” Mr Fell says, very sweetly. He shakes the big guy’s hand with both of his, manicured nails gleaming. “Ta ta, now.” The door jingles behind the guy and that’s it. 

Which leaves me and it all seems kind of awkward so I make myself scarce in the West stacks until the shop opens and I can blend with a handful of customers. There’s a complimentary carafe of hot chocolate for customers down there that I just… never noticed before, and I almost don’t try it because that thing with the Gangster was weird, yeah? And I’m thinking, fairy bread, goblin fruit. But it’s the best I’ve ever tasted, all rich and dark with spice burning my tongue in the best way. I grab a cup and a handful of finger-sandwiches and settle down with a biography of Julie d’Aubigny and next thing I know it’s lights-out again. 

* * *

By this point I’ve moved out of “quiet misery” into “wondering just how far I can push this ridiculous enterprise.” So I have a tiny wash-up in the lav, run my fingers through my hair until it looks sort of tidy and find myself a hidden nook to people-watch. It was a great choice, because this was a day when someone wanted to buy one of Mr Fell’s wonky bibles. 

I get out my metaphorical popcorn, and settle down for the show.

(You have to understand how deeply petty Mr Fell can be.)

First this guy wants to pay with a credit card. (Clearly he does not know The Rules of the Establishment.) Then he gets all flouncy when Mr Fell points to the antique till saying, cash or nothing, and slams the door on the way out. When he comes back with paper money, Mr Fell is just locking the door to go off to lunch with his skinny friend, that redhead that’s always rocking the Andro Chic look. 

Two hours, thirteen minutes later, Mr Fell is stepping out of a huge black car out of an old movie, cheeks all rosy. The book guy slithers out of the caff across the street. Quick as anything Mr Fell unlocks the door and steps inside. Flips the sign to OPEN. Through the window I see the book guy start to jog over. Mr Fell potters off. Then he does this exaggerated “Silly me” body language dance, and picks up his infamous INVENTORY STOCK-TAKE sign. Waits ‘til book guy is almost across the street. As unhurried and inevitable as a well-trained dancer, he shuts the door and flips the sign to CLOSED juuuuuuuust as the book guy gets there.

His face was mashed against the glass.

Mr Fell lifts up the INVENTORY STOCK-TAKE sign and says very loud, “I’M SORRY BUT WE’RE CLOSED. OH DEAR. YES, FOR THE REST OF THE DAY.”

Yeah, you know what happened next morning - Mr Fell told the book guy another customer had just bought it.

Hah. Rube. Everyone knows you don’t take Mr Fell’s wonky bibles.

* * *

  
  


On Friday there’s not much going on, except for this huge stack of sailing books and the doctor character is just hilarious and so is the captain and I… sorta-kinda put off calling my Mum or even Tracy so they don’t have to worry about me, and then it’s dark and I still don’t go home.

I wake up in the middle of the night with something heavy on my chest, like a weighted blanket or something, except then it moves. And I open my eyes very quick because I can feel slithering where I really did not expect slithering to be, and. there is a snake. and it is sleeping on top of me.

It pulls its head back when I move and glares at me, all affronted like a cat, and I go very still and I’m thinking, “Omigawd, the Bookshop Snake is real.”

I stare at it, and it stares at me, and then I whisper, “Sleep well.” It hisses just a bit and lays its head down sort of snuggled into my armpit.

I did not make that bit up, okay?

* * *

Not much happened on Saturday, either, or Sunday. There were customers around even though it’s normally closed on weekends. I dunno. That was a big stack of books about sailing.

Late Sunday night, real late, I’m cuddling under the tartan blanket, sans snake. Mr Fell comes puttering in, still in his jacket and plushy waistcoat, just like daytime.

He rolls up the dusty carpet in the middle of the shop and there’s this white circle painted on the floorboards like Wiccans do. He puts candles all around.

Even though the street lights are coming through the windows, it all feels very dark, and very hushed, and very still.

He can’t - he cannot _possibly_ suspect I’m there.

He says, “Mother, are you listening?” 

…

...

You know what? This bit isn’t for other people.

* * *

I slope out on Monday with the morning crowd. Enough is enough, yeah?

“My dear child,” says Mr Fell when I slink past his desk. “In fifteen years, you have not attempted to buy a single book from me.” I’m mumbling an apology when he smiles like a cherub and he touches me, right on the forehead. I can still feel the warmth of it sometimes. “May you find what you need,” he says, very solemn. And he offers me a humbug, from a tin.

I didn’t go back home.

Sorry, that’s not how this story goes. I tracked down my uncle instead, the one Mum hadn’t spoken to in a decade, and he offered me a room. It’s aces. Well, no, he’s a monster about keeping my grades up and bed-time and crap. But if I have binder days sometimes, he has his eyeliner and lipgloss. I hear him talking about me on the phone late at night, when he thinks I’m asleep. I don’t mind. I can breathe here.

Tracy is still my girlfriend. She’s taller than me now and I don’t think she’s ever going to let me forget it, ha. Lots of high heels in her wardrobe, is what I’m saying.

I still go back to Mr Fell’s, sometimes. It is a point of pride to me that I have never paid for even a pamphlet.

And I’m writing a letter to my Mum. A proper long one. We’ll see how it goes.

End of Oral History project.

**Author's Note:**

> // _Back in the caveman days_ \- “The Oxford Hysteria of English Poetry” by Adrian Mitchell - http://www.letterpressproject.co.uk/inspiring-older-readers/2019-01-09/the-oxford-hysteria-of-english-poetry 
> 
> // _wonky bibles_ \- Aziraphale’s collection of the Buggre-Alle-This bible and other misprints is a detail from the book.
> 
> // _this huge stack of sailing books_ \- I was thinking of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series, which are worth a look.


End file.
